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Britain will pay' for ock of road building
Page 7
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ILS YEAR road users will pay £3800m more in taxation than e Government will actually spend on road building, mainteince and policing.
This massive surplus of revenue over expenditure is just one the points made in a British Road Federation report which amines road-building and expenditure.
Titled No time to stop, the port calls on the Governmt to build more roads :mediately. Spending on Ids has fallen by 30 per cent ice 1973 — yet public spend; as a whole has risen by nost 13 per cent.
British road expenditure in 1977 was 2.4 per cent of state revenue, compared with 10 per cent in Italy, 7.4 per cent in France and West Germany and an EEC average of 5.6 per cent, says BRF.
Department of Transport figures predict that car traffic will rise by between 34 and 77 per cent in the next 25 years and goods traffic by between 33 and 56 per cent.
If the road system is not improved, the economic cost of congestion, delays and environmental damage will be high, says BRF.
BRF also points to the "immense programme of essential trunk and county road schemes" which remain to be completed. It lists and examines many individual trunk road schemes and goes on to review briefly the road programmes of each county in England, Wales and Scotland. Local authorities now have a £6000m backlog of by-passes and improvement plans, it says.
BRF acknowledges the effectiveness of Britain's 1500mile motorway system but reports that there are "still serious gaps in the strategic network" such as the completion of the M25 London orbital road, the Stoke-Derby link and Ma/A1 link.
But local urban and rural roads have been worst hit by the restrictions on public spending imposed on local authorities by Central Government.
Copies of the report have been sent to Government ministers and all MPs.